A champion of American filmmaking of the Golden Age, producer-director-screenwriter Peter Bogdanovich counts among his own credits such triumphs as The Last Picture Show (1971) and Paper Moon (1973).

Born in Kingston, N.Y. in 1939, Bogdanovich studied acting with Stella Adler and appeared in productions staged by the American and New York Shakespeare festivals. He began directing plays off-Broadway in 1959 and during the 1960s published books on the screen work of Orson Welles, Howard Hawks, Alfred Hitchcock, John Ford and Fritz Lang. Bogdanovich's first feature film as a director, Targets (1968), was a taut suspense film starring Boris Karloff as a horror actor who confronts a serial killer on the eve of his retirement.

Bogdanovich hit the big time with The Last Picture Show, his beautifully-observed study of small-town life in Texas in the 1950s, which won Oscars for Cloris Leachman and Ben Johnson; What's Up, Doc? (1972), an homage to Hawks' screwball comedies; and Paper Moon, a John Ford-influenced look at rural America during the Depression. The latter film brought an Oscar to young Tatum O'Neal.

Bogdanovich enjoyed a personal as well as professional relationship with Cybill Shepherd, the beautiful ingenue from The Last Picture Show, and cast her with diminishing success in leading roles in two more of his films: Daisy Miller (1974) and At Long Last Love (1975). While directing the comedy They All Laughed (1981), he fell in love with Dorothy Stratten; soon afterward, she was murdered by her estranged husband. Bogdanovich later married Stratten's sister Louise; the marriage lasted from 1988 to 2001.

Bogdanovich directed Cher to a Cannes Film Festival Best Actress award in Mask (1985) and created a sequel to The Last Picture Show called Texasville (1990). Since 1995 he has been mostly active in television; in 2004 he directed The Mystery of Natalie Wood for that medium.

by Roger Fristoe